The Roads Less Travelled …

David Cronenberg is one of my favorite modern day directors. His films showcase his ability to abstract the surreal out of the ordinary, and magnify it making us view the world around us a little differently. With movies such as The Fly, Crash, Videodrome, eXistenZ, Naked Lunch and History of Violence, he brings out the horror in our daily lives. His movies however remained nightmares; dreams from which we woke up shaken but with the knowledge that it was a dream. If to make a film is to create a new world, the primary task of the director then is to build bridges - emotional or otherwise - with the real world. It is not enough to start from the real and descend into the surreal - a film needs to continuously reinforce this connection. It is in this aspect that I felt Cronenberg was not so successful in his earlier ventures. And it is primarily in this aspect that he excels in Eastern Promises.

Like many other Cronenberg movies, violence - real or imagined - remains the central theme here too. But the plot allows him to depict the violence in this world and not in some dream world. The result is that we have a gangster movie that matches Godfather or Goodfellas in it’s depth. Much like the much vaunted Marlon Brando epic, what is seen and heard on the screen is merely the tip of the iceberg. The main action remains unseen and unheard, left to the viewer to imagine. While Cronenberg showed dreams in his earlier movies here he gives the viewer fodder for nightmares. The film captures human depravity when endowed with absolute power, and yet also shows that such depravity will leave a mark that proves to be the perpetrator’s undoing.

However, where it matches Godfather in depth it fails to match in it’s width. Godfather was not about the transition from one era to another, it was also about the era’s themselves. Eastern Promises remains the story of only the transition. But then it probably is not meant to be an epic, but merely a strong reminder of the reality of the world we live in.